Selkie 639

Looked up a lot of strange and interesting trivia while reading up on octopi for this arc. Here's one: apparently octopis don't survive mating. Males die shortly afterward and females die shortly after the eggs hatch.

Discussion (78) ¬

Poor Todd and Andi both look about ready to cry, and everyone else is totally oblivious. You are wonderfully evil Dave to drag this out. There is going to be one of those ‘inappropriate outbursts’ at some point in this little demo that is going to get them all thrown out of the aquarium and indefinitely uninvited.

you’re right, dave. ‘he’ is a subject pronoun, and ‘him’ is the corresponding object pronoun. in this case, octopi is the subject and felix is an object, so him is right. if it helps, ‘such as’ is synonymous with ‘like’ in this usage and ‘like he’ is clearly clangingly wrong.

No, anatman; at least when I was going to high school, there were such things as “predicate nominatives”. They occur mostly (actually only, as far as I know) in clauses whose verb is a copula (like “to be”) or is acting like a copula (like “seem” or “resemble”). So Alpo was right. — Another mistake: “octopi” is a barbarism because “octupus” is Greek instead of Latin. The educated plural is “octopada”. Any malacologist would know *that*, even if he knew nothing about predicate nominatives. But most English-speakers would rather say “octopuses” than “octopada”, even malacologists.

Played Kingdom of Loathing yet? (One box, many boxen, and that’s the tip of the iceberg.)

I hold with Octopodes.

Also, I grew up prescriptivist but over time became a descriptivist. For example, “I ain’t” is reasonable English, it’s just the kind of register you wouldn’t use in a research paper or during a job interview. “Nuke-u-ler” is a perfectly acceptable variant of “Nuclear.” “You guys” is gender-neutral (as it can refer to a group of girls), while various masculine terms that used to be passably gender-neutral no longer are.

If “silly” can change from “innocent” to “childishly ridiculous” then words such as “literally” and a few “-phobia”s can change meaning in much the same way, usage. Also, I used to let lie/lay be a pet peeve but really, lay is taking over and I don’t see any reason to be all fussy about it.

I have had fun training myself to use “y’all” even though it’s not part of my natural dialect 🙂

“Naturally” is “correctly”. People who think that what people say naturally is incorrect, and they should be saying something else (something non-natural), are called “prescriptivists”. “Prescriptivist” is a dirty word among linguists.

Well, Todd’s reaction is rather in keeping with EXACTLY what I predicted it would be – too shell shocked to even properly respond. I’m sure he knows that he’ll have to arrange a face-to-face with Andi soon, but he first needs time to assimilate this – and I hope Dave is wise enough to realize the very popular show at the public aquarium full of Selkie’s classmates is definitely NOT the place or time to have an outburst.

Dave> I was wondering if perhaps it is properly “Marine Biologist” instead of “Oceanic Biologist”. Also, Octopi have been known to not only escape but go of the room, down the hall, and eventually die of a lack of water. They’re very good escape artists according to my professors:)

Read an article many years ago about an aquarium that had a lot of hard to replace tropical fish go missing. They were afraid of employee theft and smuggling expensive fish, so they set up cameras to catch the culprit in the act.

It turned out an octopus in one of their displays was opening the gate to it’s cage, crawling out and across the floor, opening the latch into other tanks, eating the occupants, then crawling back into it’s own tank, and closing and locking the latches behind it each time.

I’ve heard reasonable arguments that octopi are the smartest things on earth apart from large primates and cetatians. And notably, unlike every other really smart thing we know of, they’re invertibrates, so they’re *extremely* different from an evolutionary perspective; they’ve essentially evolved their intelligence completely independly of every other really smart critter, and additionally did so when no other invertibrate has managed much at all.

The unfortunate thing, from their perspective, is that they have an extremely short lifespan (maybe 4 years), and they have no “culture”—since they aren’t raised by parents like most mammals and aren’t social creatures, every octopus is essentially forced to start from scratch on the learning curve, and only has a few years in which to learn.

If they were longer-lived and had some culture with which to pass down what they had learned, they might well rival or surpass even the non-human primates.

I’ve heard that, in areas where the local octopus population has recently increased, there is a noticeable uptick in octopus cleverness (in the wild, mostly ability to steal from traps without themselves getting trapped). The theory is the first octopus to figure it out is more likely to be seen by others, who learn the trick.

What’s even cooler is that they house parts of their brains in their legs. To the extent that if a leg is severed it can still do brain-related things for a while. Imagine having your limbs work independently of your intentions… well, actually, this has happened IRL (humans with split brains, where their hands will “fight” over whether to get a piece of clothing out of the closet or put it back) and in a manga (Parasyte, if I recall, where an alien takes over this guy’s left hand).

Also, go read Freefall. Sam Starfall is a space squid, and his culture has derived from that. Two interesting parts are that their culture lauds trickery and theft (to stay alive), and that since parents die during the process of creating the next generation and since there’s so many born at once, there’s no family structure and most of the people don’t have any desire to have their own kids.

That said, it’s possible that this man is deliberately using incorrect language for the sake of his (mostly young) audience. Since the point of his presentation is not to teach the word ‘marine’ or precise definition of invertebrate, he may have chosen other words to be more easily understood without spending time on an explanation.

Oh anytime:) And if you need info on Dinosaurs, I’m yer gal:) I correct stuff in movies all the time LOL. I happen to know someone who has a degree in “Marine Biology” so I was curious if that was correct.

Just looked it up at Merriam Webster – it seems “octopi” is actually considered correct meanwhile.

Nevertheless it hurts if you are well aware that it comes from the Greek okto-pous, eight-foot, and the scientifically correct plural is “octopodes”. If necessary, “octopuses” could be used too, although it sounds funny to me. But “octopi” definitively hurts. My fingers even itch when I bring myself to type that. – Anyway, “octopis” is just off.

The reason it gets rendered as octopi is because the LATIN plural for a word ending in -us is usually -i. Octopus, as mentioned above, derives from the GREEK for “eight feet” and consequently while using the Greek plural would make sense (the original language) and using the English plural would make sense (the language it’s in now), using the Latin plural makes no sense whatsoever.

It doesn’t fail to make sense, it just makes the same sort of sense as “Mommy goed to the store today.”

Our brains come with firmware designed to amass language without an original basis for comparison. We pick up on patterns and overlay them everywhere until the exceptions are explained to us. It makes total sense to do that with anything that looks Greek or Latin because a large amount of our vocabulary does come from those languages and very few people actually speak either Latin or one of the earlier Greek languages (be it Attic, Doric, Koine, or any of the others I don’t have straight in my head yet).

Also, because English is a hodge-podge of thefts from more languages than we can keep track of anymore. And we still insist on keeping spelling methods around that not only fail to indicate appropriate categories but actually falsely indicate existing categories that the word doesn’t even belong in (such as “margarine,” breaking the category of “g followed by a and o doesn’t soften”). Octopus was originally octopous and if it had stayed that way we wouldn’t be as likely to misclassify it.

There’s no reason to feel even the least bit awkward about getting these things wrong. The mental burden of memorizing individual word-forms in English is quite high, and it’s unreasonable to expect perfect memorization from all speakers of English.

I saw an episode of Octopussy (the James Bond movie) when I was little and always knew the plural of octopus was octopi, and it has never sounded unusual to my ears. Just like the plural of nucleus is nuclei, fungus is fungi, and cactus is cacti, there is nothing odd about this other -us word. There are more, but those are the ones that come readily to my mind. The exception to this rule are things like hippopotamuses being the plural of hippopotamus.

To be fair, Amanda *does* have a point. And it appears Selkie’s fearsome scary carnivorism is really just a Selkie thing versus a species thing. Pohl, Sai Fen, and even Suko are happy to simply be observers and learn about the octopus versus fantasizing hunting it down and eating it. Wondering if they just are better mannered, it’s different personalities, or if it’s actually a case where Selkie may more to eat than she’s being fed.

Some of it might be “kid in the candy store”. Last time I looked, vegetables were a lot cheaper than meat. Being raised in an institution, where they have to feed many people, seems like there would be a lot more vegetables on the table than there would be meat. And since she HAS TO eat meat, she would get more than the other orphans, which, most likely, caused hard feelings. And I’m sure there was more dollar-a-pound chicken on the table, than there was ten-dollar-a-pound porterhouse steak.

Or it could be that, since her species grows in a more difficult environment, the children need to (to quote Beldar Conehead ) “consume mass quantities of food” to grow correctly, and her growing body is telling her EAT MORE!!!

Yeah, there’s a thing about food-anxiety — when you aren’t entirely sure where your next meal is coming from, you can (and many to most people will) OBSESS. This can last into adulthood, too, in various forms.

If Selkie’s ever been unsure if the next meal will have anything for her to eat, it would be no wonder that she wants to eat ALL THE FISHIES! (I have similar sorts of “scan the menu” reflexes, as I don’t eat meat. And there is stealth meat in so much stuff! :p )

Agreed, she’s thrilled to be getting more to eat and the variety of it is probably still new to her too. (There was probably more variety of fish at least with her mother, but having it opened to include land animals as well is probably still pretty novel.)

Selkie IS also a budding supervillain in training, so it could be personalities… but she’s also the only sarnothi we know of who had to go through the discovery they were an obligate predator through trial and error, and I suspect the De’Madeias were in better shape integrating into human society compared to Selkie and Plo Quar, who from the flashbacks appear to have been living on their own. Could be those have left her with some food security issues or something.

Also, the De’Madeia family are all together and two of the three definitely eat all their meals at home. (No idea about Pohl, but I’m betting he brings his from home anyway.) Selkie’s surrounded by omnivores and vegetarians ALL THE TIME. I know I’ve got some food aversions that make me sensitive to what things I can actually eat. An eight-year-old who had to go through things entirely through trial and error having similar “Oh I can actually eat this!” thoughts and voicing them makes sense to me.

@Dave: In the transcript commentary, you call the creatures “octopis”. It’s either octopuses, octopi or octopodes. I know it’s hard to use words with irregular plural forms – also words that are always in singular (eg. evidence) or plural (eg. data, media) – correctly, especially if it’s not your primary language.

I would love it if this strip went full-out Octopodes. I still consider that the superior format.

Also, people who enjoy weird plurals should give Kingdom of Loathing a shot. Enjoyable game with a weird sense of humor and puns and references everywhere… and they use every weird plural they can come up with (one box, many boxen), even if they have to make it up.